This New Phishing Scam Is Catching Even The Savviest Of Internet Users

Unfortunately, internet scams just seem to be getting more and more sophisticated these days. Cold-calls and other cons are a thing of the past now. With the continued technological advancement of the internet, online banking and supposedly secure payment portals, scammers have a veritable bounty of potential revenue streams with which to swindle unsuspecting users. Suffice to say, criminals they are taking full advantage of every loophole they can find and exploit.

A phishing scam is a term you’re probably already familiar with; in Layman’s terms works like this; someone sends an email that tells recipients to click through to a link, or download something via what appears to be a legitimate-looking URL. However these URLs will typically contain typos that will clue you into the nature of the fake link. Some of these typos are subtle, some are obvious, but all of them can be spotted if you’re attentive enough.

You’d hope that reading the content of the email would alert the majority of potential scam victims that something’s amiss when the typos start appearing. However, a new type of phishing scam is far more difficult to detect, and could therefore cause even the most savvy and street-wise internet users to fall afoul of these schemes.

A homograph attack is a new and more sophisticated method of phishing, which sends an email containing a URL that will look all-but identical to the real deal.